Canonical British Novels of the Nineteenth Century

Principles of selection for novelists and novels

53 authors
201 novels
2100 characters (approximately)

1. Authors and Novels

The concept “canonical British novels of the Nineteenth Century” is a rough but useful category. The content of the category reflects a collective historical judgment about the best and most important novels of the period. The central landmarks in such a concept are clear and distinct; the borderlines are fuzzy. Few would dispute the propriety of including Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. At the borderlines, there will always be room for negotiation and individual opinion. In assessing the adequacy of the selection that has here been made, the crucial consideration is pragmatic. The purpose of the selection is to provide data on the basis of which we can make robust generalizations about the construction of character in the canonical novels of the period. If the selection is sufficiently comprehensive and representative to enable us to make such generalizations, the selection is adequate to its purpose.

The concept of “canonical status” is compounded of three chief elements: contemporary popularity and esteem, influence on other writers, and lasting critical reputation. In selecting specific novels, three main factors have been weighed: general canonical rank, the productivity of the novelist, and the variation in the quality of the novels produced by any given novelist. In making selections, we have consulted a number of reference works, most notably The Oxford Companion to English Literature (ed. Margaret Drabble), Encyclopedia of the Novel (ed. Paul Schillinger), The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (John Sutherland), various biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias, and various web-based resources, notably The Victorian Web (http://www.victorianweb.org) and Nineteenth-Century British and Irish Authors (http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/19th-authors.html). Guidance has also been derived from noting which novels are available on audio tape, which novels are currently in print in paperback form, and which novels have been adapted to film.

No novel published before 1800 or after 1914 has been included in this list. The earliest novels included are those of Edgeworth, Austen, and Scott; the latest are those of novelists such as Bennett, Conrad, Forster, Galsworthy, Lawrence, and Wells. Forster’s last novel (A Passage to India, 1924) falls beyond the cut-off, as do several novels by Conrad and Bennett and the bulk of Wells’s novels. Only Lawrence’s three earliest novels are included. Only one of Galsworthy’s notable novels (The Man of Property) falls within the time limit.

Any cut-off date for beginnings and endings has an element of arbitrariness, and all periods have interesting connections with both predecessors and successors. Nonetheless, the period 1800-1914 has a certain natural coherence. The mainstream, traditional novel, with its distinct formal conventions and mature narrative techniques, crystallizes in the work of Scott and Austen. James and Forster at the end of the period have an identifiable family relation to Austen at its beginning—a family relation that they do not have to the great novelists of the eighteenth century--to Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Hardy and Stevenson at the end can reasonably be said to be working in the tradition of Scott. To say that Hardy and Stevenson are working in the tradition of Smollet would not be intelligible in the same way. Another such division takes place at the end of the chronological range. The first major novelists who are wholly excluded by the 1914 cut-off date are Woolf and Joyce, and Lawrence’s most provocative and unconventional novels are also excluded. In other words, by adopting the first year of the First World War as a historical marker, one can segregate the traditional canonical novel from Modernist works that are self-consciously abrupt in their avant-garde break with the conventions of the previous century.

If we make allowance for Henry James and Joseph Conrad, both naturalized British citizens, the novelists included here are exclusively British. Irish and Scottish authors are included. Commonwealth authors are not.

Only a few novelists in any period are unequivocally of the very first rank in canonical status. In this period, that rank includes Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte (but not their sister Anne), Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, and James. Some in this group are prolific, some not; some are fairly even in quality, some not. Three novelists of the first rank who wrote relatively few novels, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, have all their novels listed. Thackeray also wrote relatively few novels, but only two of his novels, Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond, have sustained a critical reputation of the highest order. Two of his lesser completed novels, Catherine and The Adventures of Philip in the World, have not been included here. Conrad wrote more than twenty novels, but the majority do not display his particular genius and have not sustained popular interest or critical esteem. (About half his novels fall beyond the 1914 cut-off date, but all of his most critically esteemed novels were written before that date.) Hardy was less prolific as a novelist than Conrad, but as with Conrad some of his novels stand out as unquestionably canonical, while others are remembered chiefly for the esteem their author earned through other work. Dickens wrote more than a dozen novels, and all of his novels have retained popular appeal and have sustained a high critical reputation. All of his completed novels have been included in this list. James was prolific in major novels, but he also wrote some novels that are not often read or given much critical attention (for example, Watch and Ward, The Awkward Age). The more obscure minor works have not been listed.

Novelists of the second rank, that is, novelists who fall just below the level of the major canonical novelists, include Scott, Gaskell, and Trollope. Gaskell wrote only a few novels, and those few are fairly even in quality. All of her novels have been included. Scott was immensely influential and enormously prolific, but both his critical reputation and his popularity have declined over time. Many of his books have not remained in print, and even their titles would not now be familiar to the educated common reader. The most familiar titles have been listed, along with a representative sampling from the various genres in which he worked. Trollope was among the most prolific and popular of Victorian novelists, but his reputation dropped precipitously after his death. Over the past several decades, he has risen significantly in critical esteem, and his work remains popular with general readers. For the purposes of canonical representation, his output of nearly forty novels requires considerably selection, and since he is a remarkably even writer, the selection involves a certain amount of arbitrariness. One can make up a list of about half of his novels without omitting any of the titles that are most familiar and most critically esteemed. The arbitrariness comes in selecting among lesser known novels that are not easily distinguishable in quality. In a case like that of Trollope’s good minor novels, one seeks only a representative sampling.

Below the level of Scott, Gaskell, and Trollope, canonical status shades off from writers such as Wilkie Collins and George Meredith, who retain considerable popularity and also considerable standing as literary figures, and writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Moore, Margaret Oliphant, and Charles Reade, who were admired by their contemporaries but are now little read or esteemed. Even writers such as those in this latter group have left a few titles that merit canonical recognition, and they can thus be distinguished from writers such as William Ainsworth who were prolific and popular but who produced not a single novel that can plausibly claim canonical standing. In the case of prolific but relatively minor canonical writers, the need for selectivity becomes most intense. In this current selection, prolific minor canonical novelists are represented with fewer selections than prolific major novelists such as Dickens or James, but they are represented with more selections than some major writers who produced only one or two notable novels. Several writers, and some of real importance, are represented by only one distinctly canonical novel, for instance, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

With one exception, we have not included short stories. The stories in Kipling‘s Jungle Books, with their recurrent characters and developing plot situation, cross the boundary between stories and novels, and they have been included. (Kipling is the only major canonical writer in this period who worked mainly in short fiction.)

Novellas have been included if they are of high canonical standing. Examples of canonical novellas include James’s Daisy Miller, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Wells’ The Time Machine, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

2. Characters

Many novels contain dozens of named characters. It is not practicable nor would it be particularly useful to list all those characters. Three chief criteria have entered into the selection of characters: (1) the prominence of the character within the narrative -- that is, the proportion of attention given to the character; (2) the significance of the character within some main action; and (3) the distinctness and particularity of motive and personality depicted in the character. Big novels with multiple plots and dozens of well developed characters have the most ample representation. Dickens’ Bleak House sets a high water mark in this respect, with 39 listed characters--a majority of the total of named characters in the novel. In some of Dickens’ earlier novels, in contrast, many characters are only lightly sketched and are also incidental to any main action. The proportion of characters listed in such cases is considerably smaller. Jane Austen’s novels have character lists much smaller than those in the big multi-plot novels from later in the century, but most of the characters in Austen’s novels are integral with the main action and are also drawn with great distinctness. Accordingly, a high proportion of the named characters in her novels are listed. Some novels contain only a few characters that are sufficiently substantial to be listed. The smallest number of characters listed for any novel or novella is two, for Wells’s The Time Machine. The average number of characters per novel is about 10.

In listing characters, we have made use of various encyclopedias, abstracts, and summaries, notably the Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, Masterplots, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (John Sutherland), The Oxford Companion to English Literature (ed. Margaret Drabble), The Penguin Companion to Trollope (Mullen with Munson), and various web-based resources such as those listed above in the Rationale for the Selection of Authors and Novels.

We have tended to list major characters towards the beginning rather than towards the end of a list. Beyond that general tendency, though, the sequence in which we have listed characters within the novels is neither consistent nor particularly meaningful. Sometimes characters are grouped in family clusters, with the effect that relatively minor characters appear before more important characters who are not part of that particular cluster. At other times, some other principle of association in the plot or narrative sequence prompts the order in which characters are listed.

Since we do not wish to prejudice the reader’s responses to characters, we have chosen not to include any descriptive guidance that would help to identify the characters. We make exception only in those cases in which we distinguish family relations in order to avoid confusion. For instance, Catherine Earnshaw is identified also by the married name Catherine Linton, and Cathy Linton is identified as the daughter of Catherine and Edgar Linton. When characters are known by more than one name, the alternative names are listed.

For readers who wish to refresh their memories about which names apply to which characters, we would recommend either having a glance at the book itself or having recourse to reference sources like those we cite above. The quickest and most convenient source is the digital version of the Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, which is part of the MagillOnLiteraturePlus database. But that resource is available only to a limited number of academic libraries. As an alternative, simply googling in the phrase “characters in” followed by a novel title will often bring up a list of characters, with brief descriptions.